Glyph ( Concept )
http://purl.org/linguistics/gold/Glyph

A Glyph is a symbol used in a writing system to represent some kind of linguistic unit, such as a single sound, a phoneme or an entire word. Glyphs are concatenated in a writing system to form orthographic parts and orthographic words. Consider the printed word 'apple'. This word contains two instances of the 'p' glyph, which is a subclass of Glyph. Instances of a Glyph share a similar shape and can be called 'shapemes'. The class Glyph is not the same as Grapheme. A Grapheme is a contrastive unit within a particular writing system. The notion of a glyph is relevant across writing systems. For instance, consider the symbol 'р' used in a printed instance of a Russian word 'русский'. Now consider the symbol 'p' used in the printed instance of an English word 'pickle'. Both symbols are instances of the same Glyph. They share the same general shape, but do not have the same phonemic value.